Well, this much money would be difficult to spend all at once — I previously calculated that just $1 million would be a stack of loonies one and a half times higher than Grouse Mountain. A billion dollars would be a thousand of these stacks, and $60 billion would ... you do the math.

But this much money is all-too-easy for governments to spend. True, it would take the City of Vancouver 37 years — capital spending not included — to churn through a pile this big at the rate it’s going. But the province can do it in 16 months, and the feds in just over 10 weeks.

Not to mention an extra $60 billion — or maybe by now it’s more — that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans to add to the federal infrastructure budget over the next decade.

Yet, despite how fast it goes, this is a lot of money. So the best way to spend it — no matter how accustomed a government gets to numbers with lots of zeros — is carefully. Very carefully.

Two recent analyses flag potential concerns about how it might be spent, as well as offering advice.

A C.D. Howe Institute study advises against federal contributions to strictly local projects. Ottawa should focus instead on projects that transcend provincial boundaries — for example, key roads or other aspects of international gateways that expand opportunities for much or all of Canada. It also argues that federal infrastructure contributions to other governments should come with no strings, thus leaving the decision-making to those who will be held directly accountable.

This caution stems — rightly, in my view — from concern about how accountability is eroded and local priorities get skewed when a higher level of government funds projects that aren’t in its bailiwick.

What too often happens is that money — frequently big money with all three levels of government chipping in — gets spent on what the senior governments will write a cheque for, not on what a municipality thinks it needs. A textbook example is how the provincial government uses its control of grants and taxation authority to bully TransLink into accepting Victoria’s vision of what’s good for Metro Vancouver.

Two analysts for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, lawyer Brian Flemming and senior fellow Sean Speer, both with considerable experience as top advisers to government, also deal with accountability.

They note Ottawa’s ownership of infrastructure has declined sharply over the years, from nearly 45 per cent in the mid-1950s to well under 20 per cent today. But federal involvement in infrastructure provision has nonetheless risen through ever-increasing transfers. It reached the point under the former Conservative government where Canada is now one of the OECD’s biggest spenders, when measured as a percentage of GDP, on infrastructure.

The result, the authors assert, is that our infrastructure is in better shape than many Canadians might assume from the generally gloomy comments we hear.

I don’t think this means there isn’t room to do better. And the priority announced this week by federal Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi for the first two years and $10 billion of spending — dealing with what he called “the deferred maintenance backlog” — sounds worthy.

The trouble with this is summed up by the old saw, many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip. Experience — both with the former Liberal government and more recently with the Conservatives when they bolstered their long-range infrastructure spending with extra stimulus spending following the 2008 recession — shows that high-sounding plans usually get steamrolled by politics. Money that should be building for the future winds up doing little more than buying votes.

Sohi certainly says the right things when he speaks of looking for projects that are shovel-worthy as well as shovel-ready.

But he and his party are sending mixed signals when he speaks of using this money both to stimulate the economy and to make long-term investments in the future.

The latter is a good idea, although there is room for debate about whether this is the time to spend so much. But the former probably isn’t needed now, at a time when Canada’s economy is performing better than most, as least in some regions. And the record shows short-term spending too often stems from short-term thinking — something we’ve already seen enough of over the years.

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Don Cayo: $60 billion is a lot — it needs to be spent very carefully

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